Thinks...

by David Lodge

  My first fuck, how about that, yes, no problem, her knickers . . . The first thing I think of is her easing her knickers over her hips . . . looking at me slyly from under her hair falling forward across her face, I was transfixed, I’d never seen a woman undress before . . . except in films of course . . . but in those days you never saw a woman actually taking off her knickers on the screen, come to that I’m not sure I’ve ever . . . I mean you might see them sailing through the air or a close-up of them on the floor, but not the woman actually . . . perhaps it’s too awkward or homely an action, difficult to do gracefully or erotically, stooping and bending and standing on one leg then the other . . . Strippers for instance always have some kind of snap fastener or velcro so they can whip them off in a single movement . . . hah, that girl in that place in Soho what was it who took her g-string off before her bra . . . she wasn’t thinking, or rather she was thinking of something other than stripping, daydreaming, it was mid-afternoon, a dead hour, with only a few punters in the place, Christ knows what I was doing there, between meetings perhaps, a bit boozed and randy after a business lunch perhaps, I can’t remember, but there I was with half a dozen solitary wankers, slumped in our chairs in the violet-tinted half-darkness watching this girl in a cone of spotlight going through her routine like a sleepwalker, shedding bits and pieces of her costume as she shuffled her feet and rocked her hips to recorded disco music, until she was down to her bra and g-string . . . and then absent-mindedly she took off the g-string before the bra, hah . . . and we men in the audience all sat up as if we’d had a mild electric shock . . . a look of acute embarrassment came over her face and she faltered in her dance and lost the tempo as she realized what she’d done and she blushed, she actually blushed, and muttered ‘Sorry’, the first time she’d spoken on that or I bet any other stage, strippers never speak, and then she put the g-string back on again and went on with her robotic routine . . . Robotic, yes, if you could embed the hardware in convincing synthetic flesh it would be relatively easy to make a robot stripper, I mean the program would be so simple . . . But for a moment, just for a moment, she’d seemed like a real human being, unpredictable, fallible, vulnerable . . . somebody laughed in the darkness, a short, barking guffaw, which provoked a few other chuckles in the scattered audience, and the mood of gloomy onanistic eroticism was broken . . . Because the protocol of striptease is strict, a certain order must be observed in the exposure of parts . . . any deviation will break the frame of the event, make it seem natural . . . like undressing for bed at home . . . everybody has their own way of doing that, their own order, and sometimes you change it if it suits you . . . Carrie for instance will sometimes take off her knickers, panties she calls them, before her bra, and walk around the bedroom like that if she’s going to use the bidet, at least she used to, doesn’t walk around naked so much any more, getting selfconscious about her figure . . . Martha took her knickers off last, but then that was a kind of striptease, she was looking at me all the time, enjoying her power over me . . . I was sitting on the bed with an erection making a peak like Everest in my Y-fronts, my eyes wide, hardly breathing, mouth dry but unable to swallow . . . my ears pricked for sounds from outside, even though I’d seen Tom Beard drive away that morning in his old pick-up truck with Sol in the passenger seat and a trailer full of ewes past their prime he was disposing of at the market, what was it they called it . . . ‘casting for age’, yes, even though I knew he was going to be away till late that night still I was afraid that something might happen, a breakdown for instance or an accident and he might come back unexpectedly . . . ‘Don’t worry, love,’ she said, as she led me by the hand from the kitchen to the stairs. ‘You can hear a car coming from miles away, and that old gate squeaks like the devil . . .’ She led me upstairs to her bedroom and drew the curtains but they hardly darkened the room, the afternoon sun shone through the thin material bathing her in a soft pink light, like a stripper on a stage . . . and she began to undress, taking off each item and folding it carefully over the back of a windsor chair . . . ‘What you waiting for then?’ she said and I gawped at her like an idiot. ‘Don’t be shy, it won’t be the first time I seen you with no clothes on,’ she said, meaning that afternoon when she saw me swimming in the stream with the dogs . . . A sweltering day, we’d just moved the flock to a new pasturage, the sheep were eagerly cropping the succulent fresh grass, Tom had gone off on his tractor to see to a broken fence, and there was this deliciously cool stream which we’d forded with the flock further up, running clear over pebbles and slabs of slate with a place under a ledge deep enough for swimming . . . I couldn’t resist, threw off all my clothes and plunged in, delicious . . . the two Border collies watched me enviously from the bank, panting in the heat, their tongues lolling from their mouths but too well-trained to stir until I called them to join me, ‘Come!’ and they dashed barking into the water and paddled towards me with their noses in the air and circled round me as if I was a stray sheep . . . I fooled them by diving and popping up behind them and laughed with glee at their surprise and turned on my back and floated staring up into the endless blue of the summer sky, drifting with the current until I reached the shallows and felt the stones on the stream’s bed gently graze my back . . . I stood up and began to wade upstream towards the deep place with the dogs gambolling and splashing at my heels and then I was suddenly aware of Martha on the far bank, sitting on her bicycle with one foot on the ground, watching me with a smile on her face which broadened to a grin as I stopped and hastily covered my crotch with my hands like a footballer facing a free-kick . . . She called out where was Tom and when I told her she pedalled off with a wave . . . I stood stock still in the water with my hands over my cock till she was out of sight . . . it began to rise and thicken as I wondered how long she had been watching me with that smile on her face and after a quick look round to make sure nobody else was watching I jerked myself off, shooting my seed into the sunny air and the fast-moving stream, observed only by the patient, incurious, uncensorious dogs. Because I fancied Martha oh yes, but I hadn’t dared hope till that day that she might reciprocate, though she was always nice to me, serving me choice tidbits of food at table and asking if I had any washing, ironing my shirts better than my mother did, I knew she liked me all right, but after all she was a married woman twice my age . . . Tom though was older than her and according to Martha not much interested in sex or much good at . . . ‘Ten minutes on a Saturday night is about his limit . . .’ He’d taken a young wife in middle-age hoping to beget a son to leave the farm to and when no children came he lost interest, blamed Martha for being barren, so she told me one day, refused to consider that the problem might be his, refused to have any tests of his sperm-count, refused to discuss the matter, even though he spent – or perhaps because he spent most of his working days organizing the copulation of sheep . . . So it was the classic situation, the older husband, the frisky young wife, the young lodger brimming with spunk, only seventeen, still a schoolboy but, as Martha said, or rather whispered, ‘big for your age, love,’ a schoolboy from South London who had been sent to live on a sheepfarm in the Dales for his health, for fresh air and exercise after a spell of glandular fever . . . our GP’s idea, Tom was a distant relative of his . . . and not a bad idea, either, I grew strong and fit from the work, walking miles a day over the Dales, striding up twenty per cent inclines, wrestling with sheep for foot-rot inspection, holding them down as Tom cut out the infected tissue . . . my muscles hardened, my shoulders straightened, I must have looked pretty good to Martha wading stark naked in the stream, in fact she told me so later, ‘Like a statue in a museum, like one of them Greek gods made out of white marble . . .’ I saw the frank admiration in her smile as she watched me from her bicycle, so it wasn’t entirely a surprise when that day in the kitchen . . . though I could still scarcely believe my luck, for that matter I can hardly believe it now, imagine, a seventeen-year-old schoolboy whose body was a testosterone power station constantly on the edge of melt-down and
his mind . . . his mind a pornographic theatre that never closed . . . but whose sexual experience extended no further than french-kissing girls from our sister grammar school up the road in the lunch hour and maybe squeezing their tits under their serge uniform blazers if you were lucky . . . to lose my virginity to an experienced, warm-blooded fully grown woman . . . who laughed and told me not to worry when I came prematurely as inevitably I did . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself . . . where was I, ah yes, that day Tom and Sol his shepherd went off to the market and I was left alone on the farm with Martha and came in to eat my lunch in the kitchen, sitting at the deal table, the wood’s grain worn into grooves by years of scrubbing, as she served me and then sat and watched me eat, I was aware, inexperienced as I was, I was aware that the air was heavy with sexual invitation . . . it was in the sway of Martha’s hips as she moved about the kitchen, it was in the absence of the faded flowered pinafore she usually wore, allowing me to see the shape of her brassiere under her tight blouse and the faintest suggestion of cleavage where a button that might have been done up had been left undone, it was in the smell of shampoo from her freshly washed hair as she bent over my shoulder to put a plate of ham and cheese before me, it was in the faint smile that played over her lips as she sipped a cup of tea and watched me eat from the other side of the table, making casual conversation which I scarcely took in . . . No, I wasn’t entirely surprised that when I got up to go back to work she detained me, using one of the oldest tricks in the book, ‘I think I’ve got something in my eye, Ralph, would you have a look?’ making me stand very close to her, staring into her eye, tentatively pushing back her eyelid with my finger, feeling her breath on my cheek, feeling her bosom pressing against my chest, feeling her hands on the small of my back drawing me closer and hearing her murmur, ‘Give us a kiss, Ralph, for the love of God . . .’ I kissed her and she kissed me back and I swayed and lost my balance and staggered and she laughed and said, ‘Come upstairs and lie down, we’ll be more comfortable,’ leading me towards the staircase by the hand, and when I said what if Tom comes back, ‘Don’t worry, love,’ she said, ‘you can hear a car coming from miles away in this god-forsaken place,’ . . . but it wasn’t just fear it was guilt too, because I liked Tom, dour and taciturn as he was . . . he was very decent to me, taught me the rudiments of sheep-farming and how to command the dogs, ‘Come,’ ‘Stay,’ ‘Sit,’ ‘Come bye’ to go left, ‘Away to me’ to go right, ‘That’ll do’ to finish . . . It was a thrill to control the flock that way, by remote control, as if the dogs were connected to your brain like limbs . . . I didn’t want to cuckold the man who had taught me that, not that I knew the word then, but once we were in her bedroom and she began taking off her clothes there was no going back . . . ‘What are you waiting for then?’ she said. ‘Don’t be shy, it won’t be the first time I seen you with no clothes on,’ but I was shy, and turned my back on her as I hastily undressed down to my underpants so I missed her taking off her stockings, when I turned round she had her hands behind her back undoing her brassiere, an old-fashioned type, heavily stitched and sharply contoured, and as she shrugged it off her breasts tumbled out of the cups and spread themselves across her rib cage, outlined by half-moons of shadow . . . I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched as she scratched herself comfortably and then stooped to take off her knickers, old-fashioned knickers like the bra, French knickers I think they’re called, with wide legs, lace-trimmed, peach-coloured silk or maybe satin, she must have put them on specially . . . Funny, I never thought of that until now, thirty-odd years after the event . . . they weren’t the sort of knickers a sheepfarmer’s wife would wear every day of the week . . . She stepped out of them, straightened up, dropped them on to the seat of the chair and stood before me, a naked woman in all her glory . . . not that she was classically beautiful, Martha, or girlie-magazine beautiful, her breasts sagged a bit, her waist was too thick and her legs too short, but she was the first naked woman I had ever seen in the flesh, and when she said, ‘Well, d’you like what you see, Ralph Messenger?’ I whispered hoarsely yes in all sincerity, and she laughed softly and came over and stood in front of me so I was staring straight at her crotch sparsely fleeced with ginger pubic hair veiling but not concealing the pinky-brown crease of her cunt . . . ‘Are you going to take your pants off or shall I do it for you?’ she said, and I stood up to take them off, having to pull the elastic waistband out like a catapult to get it over my tumescent cock . . . In fact I’m having a little trouble here with my Ralph Lauren trunks right now . . . recalling all this has given me a tremendous hard-on . . . I’ll have to stand up for a moment, adjust my . . .

  Ah that’s better . . . The campus looks deserted, nobody about, no sign of Helen Reed this morning . . . intriguing woman, smart, quick on the uptake, a good arguer, prepared to stand up for herself, I like that, too many people think arguing about things that matter, arguing to win, is in bad taste somehow . . . good legs too I saw as she got out of the car last night, she was wearing one of those slit skirts which fell open as she swivelled on the seat showing a nice bit of thigh . . . I thought about giving her a kiss on the cheek when we said goodbye but decided against . . . there’s something about her, a kind of ironic detachment . . . an alertness to the least hint of bullshit . . . made me think she wouldn’t welcome it, would think I was taking liberties . . . Well no hurry, we’ll be seeing plenty of her I think, Carrie seems to like her and she must be lonely as hell stuck in that maisonette on campus, I saw her eyes light up when Carrie said come to lunch next Sunday . . . ‘Crying is a puzzler,’ I promised to look it up for her . . . not now though, back to the desk and Martha . . .

  I told Carrie the story of Martha once, thinking it would turn her on, but we ended up having a row instead because she said it was abuse, sexual abuse . . . I said, rubbish, I was eager, willing . . . ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘She was a sexually frustrated adult who used your adolescent dick as a dildo . . .’ I said on the contrary she was a warm-blooded, big-hearted woman who taught me things about sex it took my contemporaries years to learn, if they ever learned them . . . Every boy should have a Martha, I said, she taught me to be a good lover . . . ‘you mean she made you into a sex addict,’ Carrie said and turned over and went to sleep, we were in bed at the time, in the house in Pasadena . . . ‘sex addict’ . . . typical Californian psychobabble, what could it possibly mean, addicted to sex, men are biologically programmed to want as much sex as they can get with as many women as they can get . . . only culture constrains our urge to copulate promiscuously . . . sometimes suppresses it completely of course, as with priests and monks, poor deluded sods, or almost completely, as in the case of Tom Beard . . . ‘Ten minutes on a Saturday night is about his limit . . .’ He’d been a bachelor too long, a celibate bachelor, living with his widowed mother on an isolated farm, his only recreation the male camaraderie of the local pub, beer and tobacco, darts and dominoes . . . but Martha was different, she grew up in a market town in the Midlands where there were dances and cafés and a cinema and plenty of boys . . . she’d just been jilted, she told me, when she met Tom at a wedding and married him on the rebound, she was getting fed up with living at home with five siblings, sharing a bedroom with her youngest sister, Tom offered her a house of her own with a colour telly and carte blanche to order a modern fitted kitchen, and something about his slow silent dark good looks attracted her like the hero of a Western, but the physical side of the marriage was a disappointment from the outset . . . ‘Comes of spending too much time with sheep, it’s just tupping to him, a quick in and out,’ with no thought of Martha’s pleasure . . . thought being the operative word, because what distinguishes human sex from animal sex is precisely that we are able to think about it, that’s why we enjoy it, and enjoy each other’s enjoyment . . . Watch two dogs copulating in the street or two monkeys in a cage or a ram serving a ewe, the males are getting some relief perhaps, like scratching an itch, like shitting or pissing, but pleasure is not the word tha
t comes to mind, while the females seem to be just putting up with it . . . Do female animals have orgasms? I doubt it, must ask somebody in Zoology, but I bet the female orgasm was a discovery of Homo sapiens . . . or Mulier sapiens . . . and we developed bigger penises than the apes by natural selection, women tending to choose mates with big ones . . . not that there was anything the matter with Tom in that respect, as I knew from watching him piss out on the hillside, he had the equipment but he just didn’t know how to use it to give a woman pleasure . . . Martha taught me that and I’m eternally grateful to her, as were many women subsequently who didn’t know who they had to thank for the good times I gave them . . . you can’t call it abuse, if she’d just been exploiting me she’d have been angry when I came all over her the moment she took my penis in her hand, but she just laughed and said ‘Don’t worry, love,’ and caressed and stroked me until I was hard again . . . by the end of my stay I could keep it in her for fifteen minutes without coming by reciting physics formulas silently to myself . . . incidentally even if there is some randy species of chimp that has discovered the female orgasm, I bet the males don’t deliberately delay their ejaculation to prolong the female’s pleasure . . . Martha got such pleasure out of the act there were tears of joy in her eyes afterwards . . . I think perhaps I like fucking mature women more than young girls because of my first experience with Martha . . . they’re so grateful it makes you feel proud . . . and physiologically they have a greater capacity for orgasm . . . we did it six or seven more times, in the evenings when Tom went down to the pub . . . as soon as the sound of his pick-up truck faded as it passed over the brow of the hill we went upstairs . . . But one evening it happened just as I’d feared, the truck broke down on his way to the pub and he walked back to the house to phone the AA and we heard the gate squeak when we were both at it on my bed, Christ that was a narrow escape, she just got her clothes back on in time and told me to stay in bed and pretend I wasn’t feeling well . . . after that we were too scared to do it any more, at least I was . . . I had little doubt that Tom would’ve given me a thrashing if he’d caught us in flagrante, and I had visions of being sent back home in disgrace and having to confess to my parents which was even worse to contemplate . . . After the holidays I told my best friend at school all about it and he refused to believe me, he thought I was making it all up, ‘You lying bastard, Messenger,’ he said. I didn’t argue, I was quite relieved in a way . . . it seemed a kind of betrayal of Martha to tell, of Tom too, and yet I had to tell somebody, I was bursting with the knowledge of what I had experienced, but it suited me not to be believed because there was less chance of the story being circulated and perhaps getting back to my parents . . . or our GP. I wrote to Tom and Martha thanking them for my stay and we exchanged Christmas cards for a couple of years, but then we lost touch and I never saw or heard from either of them again . . . Christ it’s a quarter to ten [recording ends]